Cleaning Cooperation

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"Are there volcanoes near the Yasuki lands? There is none in the Twilight Mountains that I know of, neither in the Hida lands."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

"No. But they're still spooky." He nods firmly in declaration.

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

He nods back.
"Who needs volcanoes when you have trebuchets, anyway."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

"Hah! True!" He cheers up a bit at that. Good ol'Kaiu and their killing machines.

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

He goes back at rubbing. With force this time. "How did this place get so dirty after one day?"

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

"Did you hear the rumors of an underground city? I bet whomever found it was just covered in dirt. And probably had to walk all over as the sensei interviewed them to find out why and what happened."

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"An underground city? How so? Like, one built for siege protection maybe? But it would make no sense, this city doesn't even have walls! Also, I must confess that the lack of... high things in the horizon... here makes me kind of uneasy."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

He nods. "Yeah. I wonder if the Dragon think the same? And I don't know! Maybe someone was building something in secret?"

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"Maybe the Iuchi too? Ah. Probably Iuchi-san is not from near the mountains, although I don't know."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

"Oh! Isn't the Miya's castle in the mountains?" He goes to work trying to make the wood shine now that the main dust clouds are gone.

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"Oh, right. But the Miya will have to travel a lot. You too, and the Iuchi too, I guess. But some dragons and people like me will almost always be near the mountains."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

"Yeah, I suppose so. Though I suppose it'd depend on what kind of stuff you end up working on, yeah? What if you need to know about different types of terrain?"

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"I already got some lessons, but nothing in practice. We would have to travel too far to see open plains like those. I know how to build over different type of terrains, their strategical advantages and disadvantages, dig trenches, sap walls, construct battlements and build bridges, but there is no need for me to travel to learn any of those."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

He's surprised.

"But." He shakes his head, "How do you know what the earth is made of over the hill you can't see if you don't go to it? Or how the grasses bend in the rain or mix with the ground beneath? How stone or a troop would be able to stand on it?"

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"We don't need to travel for that. We can just go outside and test. We know how stable the grounds are by studying, and we know how to use them. Like, we study the Shadowlands too and not necessarily we even stepped on it. But don't worry on the engineering stuff, we already planned the basic stuff like houses to a test, and they got built."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

"Yeah? But what if there's things you haven't seen? Materials you haven't tested, or...or.." He looks around, "something that might inspire a different idea?"

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"We see if the idea is viable and test. Just between us, this is one of the reasons the Kaiu do toys, to get refresher on ideas. Some mechanisms we use were drawn from mechanically very elaborated woodwork. Like torsion powering."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

He ponders that for awhile in silence.

[Kaiu Aiichiro]

"I think I got too technical. Torsion is when you make something spin and distort over itself. Like when you hold the end of a thread with two fingers, the other end with two fingers of the other hand, hold one end tightly and slide the fingers of the other hand and the thread starts to do a lot of circles."

[Yasuki Ginkarasu]

He nods a little. "But what if you have better thread? Would it do more?"